The Australian Financial Review’s Canberra bureau, like most newspaper offices, is an open-plan one crammed with shambolic desks and positively hazardous tall piles of old press releases and government reports. Journalists also often have quite loud voices.

So on Thursday, when colleague James Massola was talking to a West Australian Liberal MP about the tensions within the Coalition about wheat market deregulation, I could not avoid hearing James read back to the MP, several times, what the MP had just said on the issue.

The quotes confirmed that West Australian Liberals could well cross the floor on the wheat issue.

Later, Massola spoke equally loudly to West Australian Liberal powerbroker
Mathias Cormann
about the story. The Massola end of the conversation suggested Cormann was denying there was any split in the ranks on the issue.

Massola pointed out he had quotes from the federal MP. The conversation ended. A few minutes later the MP rang back to deny that he had said any of the things in the original conversation.

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Cormann and Liberals deputy leader
Julie Bishop
, another West Australian, have been working hard in recent weeks to stop any outbreaks of dissent about
Tony Abbott
’s decision to go with the position of the east coast Nationals on the future of wheat marketing deregulation.

That is, Abbott’s Liberals are abandoning their previous long-term support for wheat market deregulation and saying they will vote with the east coast Nationals against the Gillard government’s attempt to put in place Productivity Commission proposals for further deregulation.

Deregulation of the wheat export market – which used to run as an Australian Wheat Board monopoly – started in 2008 but there are now disputes about the future of interim regulators put in place at that time, as well as issues such as access to marketing and transport infrastructure.

The free-market supporters want to move to a completely open market, while the Coalition’s official position is to call for a two-year deferral of the move.

The battle to keep WA Liberals in the cart seems to be a losing one, given that two Liberal senators, Alan Eggleston and Dean Smith, have now been identified as likely to cross the floor on the issue if it comes to the Senate.

There is more strife to come, too.

The party organisation in WA is up in arms about the federal position and the preselections of Liberal MPs and senators are being threatened if they stick with the Abbott position.

That puts Bishop and Cormann, in particular, in a difficult position but is unlikely to affect Eggleston, who has already said he will not be standing again. Smith is filling a casual vacancy caused by the death of Judith Adams.

Driving much of the campaign in the west against the current party position is former long-serving MP and Howard government minister
Wilson Tuckey
, long-time advocate of market deregulation and a politician never known to take a backward step.

“The WA Libs look like fools," Tuckey told me earlier this week.

It seems to be a battle where the Abbott discipline obsession has led the Opposition Leader into a really dumb position on the issue, both in political and policy terms.

Wheat export marketing has been an almost defining issue in the way it has long split the Coalition on Liberal-National lines and on east-west lines across the country.

The divisions were so deep when the issue was up for debate in 2008 that the then opposition leader,
Brendan Nelson
, agreed to let the Liberal and National parties split for the vote – for the first time in 25 years – with the Liberals backing deregulation and the Nationals opposing it.

This week’s announcement by WA Nationals MP
Tony Crook
that he would support Labor’s bill left the WA Libs hopelessly wedged in opposition to the bill to the ire of their constituents, who have for decades been the fiercest advocates of an open wheat export market.

It was particularly ironic, and not in a good way, that Crook’s wedge came from the seat he had won from Tuckey in 2010.

And they have been wedged for what purpose? The Wheat Export Marketing Amendment Bill 2012 has been around the Parliament since March, and subjected to both House of Reps and Senate inquiries, so everyone knows everyone else’s views on the legislation.

Tony Windsor
, the Greens and
Andrew Wilkie
have all indicated opposition to the bill.

So the brawl within the Coalition, in the name of discipline, might be for something that may never even come to a vote in the house, given Labor’s disinclination to put up legislation which it knows will fail.

The cost, meantime, has been that Abbott has once again been seen to be having his policy positions set by Queensland Nationals Senator
Barnaby Joyce
.

This is causing considerable unhappiness among Liberal MPs, both because they find themselves having to step in behind policies at odds with their free-market beliefs in the interests of party “discipline", and because they think there is no better ongoing example of indiscipline than Joyce himself.

Perhaps more importantly, the position Abbott is prepared to push sends a troubling message about where the Opposition Leader might land on a range of issues as prime minister.